Dr Pierre Boucard — Lempicka's great patron and the bacteriologist behind a famous probiotic — immortalised in a tailored white coat, a glass test tube in one hand and a gilded microscope gleaming at his shoulder, all lit by a single dramatic shaft against a cubist dark. It is science recast as Art Deco swagger: a commanding reproduction of a portrait that recently stunned the auction rooms. Lempicka paints the man of reason as if he were a matinee idol of the microscope, his white coat sculpted into planes as confident as any cathedral, the test tube held aloft like a chalice of the modern faith. Here the laboratory acquires glamour and the scientist acquires myth — knowledge itself dressed in the cool tailoring of the Jazz Age, certainty made beautiful. That single dramatic shaft of light carves him out of the cubist gloom the way discovery carves truth from ignorance, lending the whole portrait the aura of a man caught at the precise moment he became larger than his own life. He commands the eye, every gleam of his gilded instruments insisting, suavely, that to know the world is the most stylish ambition of all.
- Medium
- Print
- Framing
- Unframed
- Artwork size
- 430 mm × 305 mm
- Collection
- Lempicka
